Karl du Fresne

Friday, February 27, 2015

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, February 25.)

Laila Harre and Matthew
Hooton, enjoying a skiing holiday together?

I know it sounds implausible.
A politician of the hard Left getting on the piste, so to speak, with a high-profile
political commentator from the far Right? Surely not.

Certainly the person who told
me about it recently was astonished – and so I was, at least initially.

So I did some cursory
research (never easier than in the Google era) and sure enough, I came across an assertion by former Labour Party activist Josie Pagani that Hooton and Harre – whom
Pagani acidly described as “the great revolutionary hero” – were planning a
skiing holiday in Canada with their respective families.

As far as I can ascertain,
Pagani’s claim was never confirmed – but then, neither was it denied. Hooton,
when questioned, played coy. He said the two families would be at the Whistler
resort at the same time, but stopped short of saying they would be holidaying
together. He must have known the story would cause outrage on the Left, and no doubt relished the prospect.

The reaction of my informant, who is strongly left-wing, was probably typical. She was appalled that Harre, a former
Alliance MP and leader of the ill-fated Internet Mana Party, should fraternise with
someone viewed by the Left as being on the dark side.

I don’t recall the words
“betrayal” and “hypocrisy” being used, but they certainly hung in the air. How
could someone profess to be a champion of the poor and downtrodden while skiing
with a representative of the ruling class?

It wouldn’t have helped that
skiing is a pursuit associated with money and privilege. Holidays at Whistler
don’t come cheap. Perhaps it would have been more excusable had they gone
fishing together for kahawai off the end of a wharf, or played darts at the
local RSA.

But knowing there was money
in Harre’s family (her grandfather was credited with inventing the jandal), I
wasn’t entirely surprised to hear Harre was a keen skier.

She has always given the
impression of enjoying the finer things in life. Her husband owns a medical
research company and the couple jointly own a vineyard (organic, of course) on
Waiheke Island.

She wears expensive clothes and I recall a friend, many years ago, showing me the handsome holiday home at Tolaga Bay that she and her husband, according to locals in the know (and there are no secrets in Tolaga Bay), spent a large sum restoring.

Does that necessarily make
her a hypocrite? While I dislike Harre’s politics intensely and always get a quiet thrill
when sanctimonious leftists are exposed as closet capitalists, there’s no law
that says they must drive 1980 Cortinas and wear track pants. In fact there’s a
long tradition of left-leaning political reformers coming from privileged
backgrounds.

And while I initially shared
my informant’s shock at the suggestion that Harre and Hooton were chums, on
reflection I came around to a different point of view.

I thought about my own
situation. I have a number of long-standing friends who don’t like my political
views, but we don’t let that get in the way. We focus on the likeable qualities
we see in each other and generally succeed in setting politics to one side.

Life would be very dull if we
fraternised only with people who think like us. It would be like being trapped for life in a Rotary Club meeting.

Let’s assume for a moment
that Harre and Hooton really did go skiing together. Who are we to say they
shouldn’t enjoy each other’s company?

Skiing with Hooton doesn’t
mean having to agree with his politics. In fact the two might learn something
from each other. Isn’t that preferable to shouting at each other over an
ideological chasm?

The notion that we shouldn’t
associate with people who think differently alarms me. Democracy is about the
free exchange of ideas, but we retreat into tribal enclaves, erect barricades
and refuse to have anything to do with the enemy.

We block our ears and hum
loudly when anyone dares express a contrary thought. It’s as if we’re scared of
being exposed to ideas that might turn out to be less heinous than we imagined.
Groupthink takes over.

This happens on both the Right
and the Left and has become noticeably worse since the advent of the Internet.
Political blogs and websites provide fortresses where like-minded people can
band together, drawing comfort and reassurance from their conformity and angrily
repelling all invaders.

Anyone who challenges the
consensus becomes the enemy. This can have strange consequences, as I
discovered recently when I wrote a column asking whether John Key really believed in anything.

My column was picked up by conservative
blogs, triggering an avalanche of venomous comment attacking me as a
hand-wringing leftie.

You’ve got to laugh. No one could
read a selection of my columns from the past 30 years and conclude that I’m a
leftie. But I’d committed the unpardonable sin of writing a column that wasn’t
slavishly pro-government.

In today’s world, it seems, you
must be either 100 percent Left or 100 Right. People with fixed, rigid ideas feel
threatened when anyone deviates from the norm. Infidels must be punished.

I’m not sure what you call
this, but it certainly isn’t democracy as I understand it.

Monday, February 23, 2015

On Monday night I went to a public meeting in the Masterton
Town Hall.

The hall was full, which might have something to do with the
fact that not a lot happens in Masterton on a Monday night and a meeting in the
Town Hall provides an exciting diversion.

On the other hand you might say this was the beating heart
of local democracy, even if most of the heads in the hall were grey.

The meeting was organised by Sustainable Wairarapa, a group of
business people who believe the region stands to benefit from the
Local Government Commission’s proposal to establish a “super city” encompassing
Wellington, the Hutt Valley, Porirua, Kapiti and the Wairarapa.

To promote their case they enlisted former Waitakere mayor
Sir Bob Harvey and Greg Moyle, who serves on the Waitemata community board in
the Auckland super-city. The idea was that they would tell us how much better off
Auckland was following amalgamation.

They might not have been the best choice. Here were two politicians
from New Zealand’s biggest, most densely populated urban area presuming to tell
the residents of a sparsely populated farming region at the other end of the
North Island that joining a super city could only be good for them.

I would have been more interested in hearing the views of
someone from Rodney or Franklin, two semi-rural districts that were either
wholly or partly press-ganged into joining Auckland.

Even those two districts are not strictly comparable with
the Wairarapa, which is rural heartland rather than a lifestyle belt, but I
imagine their residents might have quite a different verdict on the benefits of
amalgamation.

Besides, Harvey and Moyle are insiders, embedded in the
system. It’s in their interests to talk up Auckland’s governance arrangements.

Harvey chairs Waterfront Auckland, one of the highly
contentious CCOs (council-controlled organisations) that have caused so much
ill-feeling among Aucklanders since the supercity was created in 2010.

He’s a sincere man and an engaging speaker with long
experience in local government, but he can’t claim to know the Wairarapa.

He also seems to have an ad man’s faith in empty slogans.
“You have to trust the future”, he said at one point, sounding like one of the
billboards he might have created in his advertising agency days.

Moyle spent more time talking about himself than about the
issue and admitted he knew nothing about the region he had come to advise,
“apart from drinking a lot of Martinborough pinot noir”. He even struggled with
pronunciation, referring more than once to “Waipara”.

All this leaves me in a bit of quandary. My wife and I have
lived in Masterton since 2003. It suits us, as it does the many refugees from
Wellington who have moved here.

I’m open to persuasion that amalgamation would be the best
thing for the Wairarapa, as many respected business and community leaders
argue. But no one has convinced me yet.

In fact, although not a religious man, I find myself slowly coming
around to the view that God had a reason for putting the Rimutaka Hill where it
is.

Much of the propaganda seems to hinge on what might happen
to us economically if we’re cut loose from wealthy Wellington. We’re too small
and weak, the argument goes, to survive on our own. The proponents of amalgamation have played the fear card rather too much.

I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t think it would be a
good idea to merge Masterton, Carterton and South Wairarapa councils. But
amalgamation with Wellington? That’s another proposition entirely. We’re
different from Wellington culturally, demographically and economically.

Most of all, I worry about what it would mean for representative
government. The Wairarapa would have only two of the 21 seats on the proposed
supercity council. The centre of power would be too far removed from those
affected.

Do I trust Wellington-based councillors to understand what’s
best for the Wairarapa? No, and it doesn’t help that when I look at the Greater
Wellington Regional Council, which is the closest thing we’ve got to a super
council, I see a coterie of former Labour and Green MPs – professional
politicians who seem unable to wean themselves off the public teat.

Am I convinced that the democratic deficit will be made up
by the proposed community boards? No. It certainly doesn’t seem to have worked
out that way in Auckland.

Do I trust the Local Government Commission, with their misplaced faith in the virtues of Big Government? Not for a moment.
They can’t even get their figures right.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

It’s rarely that I feel moved to write in defence of a
Labour Party leader, but TV3’s attempt to skewer Andrew Little over an unpaid
bill is pure mischief-making.

Two nights in a row, Patrick Gower has tried
to beat this up into a major embarrassment for Little. Last night he went so
far as to say it signified the end of the honeymoon for the Labour leader. The rest of the media don’t seem too excited over it, but when TV3's political editor says it's the end of the honeymoon - well, it is, at least as far as TV3's concerned.

Gower does some very good work, and I’m mostly a fan. But when
he gets bored, he tries to inflate minor issues into crises. Conflict and drama
are meat and drink to him, and when there isn’t any he’ll manufacture it. On
this occasion his friend and stablemate Duncan Garner, on RadioLive, seems to have been an
enthusiastic accomplice.

If the affair of the unpaid bill is embarrassing to anyone,
it’s Little’s chief of staff Matt McCarten. Everything Gower has reported
suggests that’s where the blame lies for not paying freelance journalist David
Cohen the $950 owed to him for advice given during Little’s bid for the party
leadership last October.

That’s as it should be. Party leaders can’t be expected to
deal with the minutiae of housekeeping.

Little could probably have got himself off the hook by
saying the problem lay in McCarten’s office, but of course he wouldn’t because
it would look like he was dumping on his right-hand man. And what fun Gower would
have had with that.

The most interesting aspect of the non-story to me is the
revelation that Cohen was engaged to work for the Labour Party.

I know that freelance journalism is a precarious way to make
a living, and that there’s a powerful temptation to take work wherever you can
get it. But conflict of issues arise when people who comment on matters of
public interest (Cohen is National
Business Review’s media columnist) are simultaneously involved in political
work behind the scenes.

I suspect this goes on much more than we know. Cohen has
come out in the open because he was understandably pissed off at not being
paid. Otherwise his relationship with Labour would probably have remained secret. How
many other notionally independent commentators, I wonder, are potentially compromised
by connections we don’t know about?

Thursday, February 12, 2015

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, February 11.)

It’s hard to think of a more challenging conundrum than the
one posed by the Islamic State.

Labour leader Andrew Little was right last week to describe Isis as evil. It’s a word seldom heard these days because it implies a moral
judgment, and moral judgments are unfashionable. But “evil” is the only way to
describe men who coldly behead their captives, then amp up the shock factor by
burning one alive.

There is an element of gleeful sadism in their barbarism. Last
week they pushed a gay man from the top of a tall building – reportedly the
fourth such execution for homosexuality.

As with their other atrocities, they posted pictures and
video online, a gesture that was part boast, part taunt. In doing so, they were
saying to the world: “Look what we’re capable of. There is no limit to what we
will do.

“Norms of civilised behaviour don’t apply to us. In fact we
hold the civilised world in contempt. You know, and we know, that you are too
weak and divided to stop us.”

These otherwise primitive haters of the decadent West
mock us further by using sophisticated Western technology to rub our noses,
figuratively speaking, in the blood of their victims. Without the smartphone,
the video camera and the Internet, their power to shock would be enormously
diminished.

And these are merely the more flamboyant examples of the
Islamic State’s depravity – the ones calculated to get our attention and fill us
with fear, horror and anger. Almost unnoticed in the background, Isis is
proceeding with its grand plan to establish an Islamic caliphate, which means
systematically slaughtering or enslaving anyone who stands in its way.

No one, then, can dispute that the Islamic State is evil.
The conundrum is what the rest of the world should do about it.

I wish there was a pat answer, but the Islamic State
presents a unique challenge because it stands apart from all norms of combat or
diplomacy.

It has no regard for human lives, including those of its own followers. It
acknowledges no rules, it has no interest in negotiation and its adherents –
who seem to include a significant number of thugs with criminal records – are said
to be happy to die for their cause because it will ensure entry into paradise.
How do you defeat such an enemy?

Yet doing nothing is not an option. Either we believe
civilised values are worth defending and that vulnerable people deserve
protection from mass murderers, or we don’t. And if we do, we can’t just
whistle nonchalantly while looking the other way and pretending it isn’t
happening.

We have been here before. In 1994 New Zealand was one of
only three countries in the United Nations that supported forceful intervention
to prevent genocide in Rwanda. The rest of the international community didn’t
want to get involved, having recently seen America get its nose bloodied in
Somalia. More than half a million lives were lost as a result.

A similar situation arose in the Balkans War, where a puny
and impotent UN peacekeeping force did nothing as thousands of Muslims were massacred.

The situation in Iraq and Syria is not dissimilar. The West
has lost its appetite for combat because of failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Islamic State is counting on America and its allies having no stomach for a
fight; it is goading us, convinced that its will is stronger than ours. And so
far it has been proved right. The military response has been half-hearted.

In effect, the Islamic State is testing the moral resolve of
the civilised world. I just hope we won’t fail the test as we did in in Rwanda
and Srebrenica.

This is not like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the
objectives were hazy (or in the case of Iraq, tragically misconceived). Isis is not some shadowy terrorist entity; it’s a functioning army, operating in
plain sight.

That doesn’t make it easy to defeat, but neither is it an
excuse to do nothing.

It’s interesting that where the Islamic State is concerned, the
Left sharply deviates from its honourable tradition of siding with the weak and vulnerable.
The Islamic State, it insists, is not our problem, no matter how many innocents
die.

I suspect the Left is unable to see past its antipathy
towards America and can’t bring itself to support any initiative in which
America plays a leading role. Its ideological blinkers blind it to the fact
that on this occasion, America is on the side of the angels.

Yes, it’s ironic that the American invasion of Iraq helped create
the circumstances that enabled the Islamic State to flourish. George W Bush
barged in like a Hollywood sheriff come to clean up Deadwood.

But that doesn’t mean the West should wash its hands of the
appalling crimes being carried out as a result. Indeed America could be seen as
having a moral responsibility to clean up the mess it helped to create.

Most reprehensible of all is the craven argument that we
should avoid antagonising the Islamic State for fear that some deranged
jihadist will strike at us. That’s moral cowardice of the lowest order.

John Key is right to highlight the inconsistency in the
Left’s stance, and I applaud him for saying that New Zealand will not look the
other way. It’s rare for Key to commit himself so emphatically, and commendable
for him to do so on one of the pressing moral issues of our time. We should hold
him to it.

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Three failed prime ministers in a row – shouldn’t
Australians be getting worried?

Looking forward to another day of joyous celebration at
Waitangi?

Fed up with the daily bombardment of conflicting advice
about healthy diet and lifestyles?

Easier to shrug your shoulders and ignore it all?

Does anyone outside politics and the media really care exactly
when prime minister John Key learned about former MP Mike Sabin’s problems with
the police?

Having said that, wouldn’t Key save himself a lot of trouble
if he was a bit more honest and up-front?

An inmate dies after trying to smuggle drugs into Otago
Prison in his stomach and his mother reckons it’s the fault of the prison staff?
Really?

So Ngapuhi leaders are squabbling over a Treaty settlement –
who’d have thought?

If and when they resolve their differences, can we hope
they’ll manage their finances better than the Tuwharetoa bosses whose $66
million “Treelords” settlement magically evaporated in five years, leaving just
$16 million?

Tired of reading about craft beer?

Could pompous, eccentric and ineffectual Prince Charles be
God’s gift to the struggling republican movement?

Given that Andrew Little has barely put a foot wrong since
taking over as Labour Party leader, why risk hiring a spin doctor who might
screw it all up?

Is the dearth of quality free-to-air television proof that
programmers have given up trying? Or have they simply delegated the job to the
office tea lady?

The Rugby Sevens – yesterday’s sensation, today’s yawn?

So what’s the next diversion for a society suffering from
mass attention deficit disorder and constantly craving new excitements?

When did police give up bothering to enforce the cycle
helmet laws?

So cinema admissions in New Zealand last year were a record
high. But hang on – wasn’t the advent of television in the 1960s supposed to
mean the death of films?

Is it a condition of employment by the University of Otago
that its academic staff constantly lecture the public on the wickedness of
their ways and deplore everything that popularly elected governments do?

Hyper-inflation, empty supermarket shelves, media
censorship, political prisoners – is Venezuela the latest advertisement for the
glories of socialism?

Tony Blair – the most contemptible Western politician of our
time?

Amid all the chortling and sniggering over the couple filmed
having a “sex romp” in a Christchurch office, has anyone given a thought to the
potentially devastating personal consequences?

Speaking of
which, what exactly is a sex romp?

Do New Zealanders really cut down tall poppies, as Eleanor
Catton claims, or do they simply object to preciousness and petulance?

Thousands died at the hands of the prophet Mohammed, but how
many people did Jesus Christ kill?

Tired of
reading about house prices?

If the British really regard us as “family”, as Foreign
Secretary Philip Hammond claimed this week, how come we have to languish in
queues at Heathrow while French, Romanians, Greeks and Estonians get
fast-tracked?

Saturday, January 31, 2015

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, January 28.)

We have a pronounced aversion to TV commercials in our
house. It’s the job of whoever is in possession of the remote to hit the “mute”
button the moment an ad comes on screen.

Failure to do so earns a look of stern reproof – even sharp
words if the reaction time is too slow.

I don’t know where my wife’s abhorrence of commercials comes
from, but in my case I think it must be inherited. Way back in the 1960s, long
before the first remote control units hit the market, my father made his own.

He wired the necessary bits and pieces and packed them into
a decorative little pot that had previously contained Alberto V05 shampoo. In
the lid he mounted an old-fashioned switch.

The device sat on a little table beside Dad’s armchair and was
connected to the TV set by a cable that ran under the carpet. The moment the
ads started, click! Blessed silence.

Dad was an electrical engineer by profession and made a lot
of ingenious gadgets, but I reckon that was his crowning achievement.

The mute function is even more precious now than it was
then. In fact we often leave it on through entire programmes, occasionally
glancing up from whatever we’re reading just in case a subversive TV programmer
has breached policy by showing something that isn’t a complete insult to taste
or intelligence. Needless to say, they never do.

But even with the sound off, you can’t help occasionally
noticing what’s on screen. And over the holiday period, my attention was
captured by a commercial showing water being poured into a glass accompanied by
the caption “Not Beersies”.

I briefly considered the possibility that this was an
advertising campaign aimed at persuading everyone to drink water instead of
beer, but dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Who would waste money on something
so cringingly patronising?

The juvenile language – “beersies” – suggested some sort of
spoof. I concluded it must be a satirical ad, the purpose of which wouldn’t be clear
unless I turned the sound on – something I wasn’t prepared to do.

Well, more fool me. I must have been the only mug in New
Zealand not to realise that a substantial sum of public money – our money – had
been blown on a po-faced social engineering campaign exhorting us to do just
that: drink water instead of beer.

Documents obtained by the New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union, a
lobby group set up to expose wasteful use of taxpayers’ money, show that the
campaign cost at least $1.2 million. That doesn’t include advertising agency
fees, which were treated as confidential because of commercial sensitivity.

Moralistic advertising campaigns designed to change our
behaviour are a gold mine for the advertising industry. But whether they have
any impact is another matter.

This one, which was financed by the Health Promotion Agency,
was clearly predicated on the assumptions that we’re a nation of drunks – which
statistics prove isn’t true – and that a TV advertising campaign will magically
convince us to change our ways, which is another highly suspect proposition.

Ironically, the Taxpayers’ Union also obtained the results
of focus group research which showed that the people least likely to take
notice of the campaign were “entrenched, high-risk drinkers” – the one group
whose drinking behaviour needs changing.

So if anyone is going to be influenced by the commercials,
which is improbable, it’s likely to be people whose drinking actually isn’t a problem. And as the
Taxpayers’ Union points out, beer consumption is in steady decline anyway,
although you won’t hear the alarmist wowser lobby mention that.

More damningly, the Health Promotion Agency disclosed that
it conducts no cost-benefit analysis of its campaigns. In other words, no one
knows whether the silly “Not Beersies” ads will make a blind bit of difference.

The HPA takes refuge in woolly, imprecise phraseology such
as “long-term culture change”. That way it can’t be pinned down.

I’ve now made the supreme sacrifice by watching the ads –
all six of them – on You Tube, with the sound on, and they confirm my most
cynical thoughts about TV advertising.

The campaign is a crock. First, it’s patronising. It treats
us as imbeciles who need help to make the choice between water and beer, and it
compounds the insult by using childish language (“Beersies”) more suited to a
day care centre.

It doesn’t even get the message clear, as the focus group
feedback showed. Some viewers found it confusing.

But the most objectionable aspect of the campaign is that it
pretends complex social issues can be addressed through quirky TV commercials. The
underlying premise is lazy, deceitful and simplistic.

Government agencies like the HPA must be God’s gift to the
advertising business. They have lots of money to throw around on social
engineering projects, they are highly susceptible to advertising
agency bullshit, and they obligingly don’t insist that the ads produce measurable
results.

That leaves the agencies free to do what they most like
doing – making commercials designed to impress other agencies and to win prizes
at industry awards ceremonies, of which there seems to be least one every month.

It’s a lethal combination, then – a taxpayer-funded bunch of
do-gooders on a mission to make us all better people, and an advertising agency
eager to use the our money to make ads that don’t achieve anything.

I HAVE never met John Key, but like anyone who follows
politics I’ve been able to observe him via the media. And after studying him
carefully, I think I now realise the explanation for much of his behaviour.
He’s on drugs.

Not the illegal kind, I should stress, but the mood-calming type
that doctors prescribe.

This may sound flippant, but consider the following.

In the 2014 election campaign, Key was subjected to possibly
the most sustained media offensive faced by any prime minister in New Zealand
history.

Day after day he was tackled by an aggressive media pack trying
to trap him on dirty politics, illicit surveillance and other touchy issues.

His answers were often unsatisfactory, which served only to
ramp up the media frenzy. But through it all Key appeared supernaturally
imperturbable.

He patiently batted away reporters’ questions and
accusations with his familiar bland inscrutability. There were no meltdowns, no
hissy-fits, no petulant walkouts.

This was downright unnatural. No politician should be that
unflappable. He can have achieved it only by the ingestion of large amounts –
indeed, industrial quantities – of tranquillisers.

This may be one of the secrets of Key’s extraordinary
success. After three terms he’s had only one falling-out with the media, over
the so-called teapot tapes, and remains both accessible and affable. He resists
all attempts to provoke him.

New Zealanders seem to like that, but I find it slightly
creepy. Politicians are supposed to be peevish with journalists.

Helen Clark’s withering death stare could turn reporters’
bowels to water. She could be personable, even charming and witty – a side of
her that the public rarely saw. But she didn’t take kindly to being subjected
to the journalistic blowtorch, as John Campbell discovered when he ambushed her
over genetically modified crops.

Robert Muldoon’s intolerance of all but the most obsequious
journalists was legendary. He banned reporters he didn’t like, such as Tom
Scott, and on one occasion issued a fatwa against an entire newspaper – the
precursor of the one you’re reading – because it had published politically
embarrassing stories.

David Lange’s relationship with the press gallery started
out promisingly enough. Reporters were charmed by his wit, especially after
nine sour years of Muldoon. But even Lange turned prickly once the media honeymoon was
over and the press started focusing on rancour within the divided Labour Party.
In the end he became uncharacteristically bitter and grumpy.

Such behaviour is entirely human, which makes it all the
more puzzling that Key manages to remain pleasant and co-operative even when
the media is clearly out to skewer him.

Okay, my drugs theory is flippant. But to turn serious for a moment, I can’t help
wondering whether Key’s irrepressible niceness reveals something significant
about his character.

He is now in his third term as prime minister, but we still
have little idea of what drives him, other than the attainment of power. We
don’t really know what his core values are and what, if anything, he’s deeply
committed to. He’s never really told us.

It’s accepted that National is, above all, a party of
pragmatists, supposedly committed in a vague way to free-market capitalism and
individual freedom, but not too hung up on ideological purity and willing to
bend whichever way is necessary to hold the political centre ground.

But even by National Party standards, Key comes across as Mr
Neutral, with no rock-solid, non-negotiable convictions. If he has an over-arching vision, it's not visible. His approach
is to do what works politically, which isn’t necessarily what’s right.

This may explain why he manages to remain so unruffled. Perhaps
there’s no real passion there. Perhaps he enjoys power for its own sake more
than for the ability to achieve things, which is what attracts most people to
politics.

This is not so say Key isn’t highly intelligent or capable.
Clearly he is. It’s also possible that he’s a naturally nice person, or
alternatively so controlled and disciplined that he has trained himself not to
bite back.

He may also be well-intentioned, in a very general way. It’s
stretching credulity to suggest, as some people do (and not just on the Left),
that his smiley exterior is a mask, and that he’s really ruthless and malevolent.

But we occasionally hear about his post-Beehive
ambitions, and there remains the disconcerting possibility that the reason he never
gets rattled is that politics is just another step on his glittering career
path – a game, almost – and that when he tires of it he’ll find something else.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.